Really Good Burgers, Colosseum: 'There's no such thing as a bad burger'
In which Seldon is almost taken out by an avalanche of sauce
Really Good Burgers is one of the newest joints on the block, touted by Bristol’s biggest influencer — who’s seemingly transcended Instagram and landed bona fide modelling gigs on actual websites. Good for him. But while hype might be fuelled by social media, all of The Bristol Sauce’s reviews are paid for in full and carried out anonymously. The aim: honest, entertaining reviews you can trust when deciding where to spend your burger money. If that’s worth something to you, please consider upgrading your subscription for just £3.50 a month.
In the future nothing will be anywhere, everything will be fluid and transitory. The idea of a bricks and mortar establishment humbly slinging their own hash for pay will be a sweet but archaic memory.
I know of several well-known 'traditional' restaurant people/chefs who have toiled for years to get their own place and are now kicking mighty hard under the surface just to stay afloat. The idea of a transient, movable feast pop-up seems a much lower risk approach in the present maelstrom of the Bristol (and indeed, UK) dining scene.
Which brings us to Really Good Burgers at Colosseum. It was a toss up between their residency here, or some far-flung third-world hellhole (Fishponds) so naturally, there we were, waiting to be entertained.
*As an ex-Fishpondian, I must concede it is now quite nice. But you weren’t there in the early nineties, man.
I have long been intrigued by the iconic 'Colly'. I used to see it on cab rides home late at night — it looked pretty buzzing; the cascading lawns strewn with good-time students giving it a fun 70s relaxed appeal. The font on the sign itself is redolent of a slightly louche and loose bygone time where collars were open and lights were low.
In essence it was a little less louche and more like a hipster pub — having been taken over by World Famous Dive Bars in the summer of 2023 — on a once woebegone estate that has had a mild taste of gentrification. Surprisingly, we had our choice of seats on a lovely sundown terrace. I suppose most punters flock to wet their feet in the harbour when the sun hits.
The negronis (£11 each) were decent. But then, if you have a freezer, it is quite hard to fuck one up, providing you don’t have any aspirations of innovation. Suitably inebriated, we chose two of the seven Really Good Burger options.
We ordered a Really Good Blue (£12) and a Really Good Beef (£10) with some brisket and gravy loaded fries (£7). A charming young man had us with a faceful of burger in no time at all — but my immediate thoughts were that it was all just so goddamn wet.
The sesame seeded buns were being asked to do a lot of heavy lifting and fortunately were decent enough to stand pretty firm against the deluge. The patty was delicious, but then it’s tricky to discern against so much shallot and cheese white noise.
Is it entirely necessary for restaurants to advertise their ethos? It is one thing to have one and to work responsibly and sustainably within your operations and to buy the best produce available to you, but that should be a standard practice for any half-decent gaff. It’s not like you are laying out your morals to curry favour with the public to open a charitable branch of a learned institution or applying for funding for research into assisted dying. We are but burger slingers.
It is also perhaps irrelevant where the meat comes from when it so bludgeoned underneath the sensory tsunami of braised onions, blue cheese and mayo. Yet, my interest was piqued as I saw the meat here comes from Dart's Farm; an incredible farm shop near Exeter that I can wholeheartedly endorse. Dart’s makes Selfridges’ food hall look like Bridgwater services. It’s sustainably run and the great produce makes it easy to love despite the fermentation workshops and becoming known as a “Tesla paradise”.
All of this matters not in careless hands. Maybe I am too old for this brand of dude food and should stop looking for some kind of pronounced flavour or structural integrity in my food. The loaded chips were reasonable in essence, but the sauce and cheese combination was alarmingly sweet. After any period of time with their new friends, the chips too became a bit one-note and of course, sodden. Sliced gherkins almost save the day but then gherkins are always delicious. Speaking as a part-time cheesehead who happily devoured poutine with copious cheese curds across Milwaukee and North America, this was a too-sloppy attempt at gravy-ed fries.
And maybe it could be argued that as the burgers were so juice-driven that a plain fry would have been the wiser choice but what can you do. Incidentally, whilst living in Vancouver as a student, my father claims he had the same burger every day for eight months from the golden arches and is still alive to tell the tale. Perhaps this was the genesis of my preference for classic and not overly sauced patty and bun.
But all of this stuff tasted pretty good, in that quite base way that any assemblage of meat and fat and cheese is always going to be tasty as hell and damn the consequences. However, it needed a slightly sharper eye on the construction as was a little overwhelmingly saucy for this burger purist. There’s no such thing as a bad burger, but this was a little more fluid and transitory than most.
All words and photos by Seldon Curry
Really Good Burgers, Colosseum, Redcliff Hill, BS1 6SJ
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I thought it was a decent new burger space. I find Squeezed off-the-wall too wet/sauced, so compared to that I found the basic burgers here pretty good. I thought the blue cheese ones were incredibly blue cheesy, good if you want that ...
Those sliced gherkins on the loaded fries do look rather good!